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There’s a whole catalog of devices that are missing from our world. Things we’d pay money for — things you could earn money with — don’t exist thanks to the chilling effects of an obscure copyright law: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA 1201). That law makes selling a device that bypasses access controls on copyrighted works illegal, with criminal penalties of 5 years in prison (for a first offense!), and potential civil penalties in the millions.

It’s hard to notice what isn’t there. We’re aiming to fix that, with this work of “design fiction” — a collection of devices, services, products, and tools. These things could have been, and should have been, but never were.

Thanks to DMCA 1201, manufacturers of products as varied as phones, game consoles, insulin pumps, and cars have locked down the software in those products — all in order to control you and the gadgets you own. They can threaten you with lawsuits and felony prosecution for ordinary things like using your own mechanic instead of the one with the company's official, $70,000 tool. They force you to buy additional copies of movies you want to watch on your phone, instead of just allowing you to rip the DVD you already own. And they block your printer from using anything but their official ink cartridges, conning you into spending more on ink than you would on vintage champagne.

Physics Barbie

Soraya Okuda

Savvy parents know that every cloud-connected electronic gadget they buy for their kids is a potential hole in their network, a sneaky listening device that hangs around some of the most sensitive and personal moments of your kids' lives and the lives of your whole family. But tomorrow's smart parents know that those toys are a potential platform for innovation, places where parents, programmers and businesses can work to create new operating systems that never talk to the cloud, and that replace the canned messages of a distant corporate design department with material of your own choosing.

Meme-Making DVR

Hugh D'Andrade

The Supreme Court says that copyright requires "escape valves" like fair use to comply with the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of expression. Fair use -- and its non-US cousin, Fair Dealing -- allows people to make new works from copyrighted materials without permission, especially when it comes to political speech that transforms a political message in order to criticize it. But once DRM is in the picture, your ability to exercise this key right -- without which copyright itself is at odds with the Constitution -- depends on permission from the people you want to criticize. The ability to bypass DRM is critical to squaring copyright with free expression.

Rein N Train

Soraya Okuda

Privacy is often presented as a "bargain": give us your data (by shopping with our customer loyalty card, switching off your adblocker, or taking this survey) and we'll give you a discount or a service in return. But these "offers" are more often punishments for noncompliance: "refuse to use our loyalty card and we'll charge you extra" or "refuse to allow us to spy on everywhere you go and everything you do, and we'll jack up your insurance rates." There have always been limits on how much your insurer can force you to disclose to get a policy, and DRM shouldn't change that.

Ad Free Youtube Kids

Nicola Ginzler

Since the invention of the remote control, rightsholders and audience have fought a war over ads. The market for tools to skip, mask or mute ads holds publishers and marketers to account: they know that if their ads get too obnoxious, their audiences will be motivated to make them disappear. With DRM, though, the arms race changes: the audience gets disarmed, leaving the marketing side to get as invasive and intrusive as they want.

Machine Translation

Nicola Ginzler

For the most part, rightsholders don't object to user-created subtitling, which is key to making videos available to non-native speakers of the media's original language, and accessible to people with hearing disabilities. Fansubbing and similar practices predate internet videos by decades, but creating a crowdsourced subtitling tool becomes a potential felony once DRM gets in the picture, if the DRM has to be bypassed to get the subtitles in.

TextToSpeech

Nicola Ginzler

In 2009, Amazon introduced, then rescinded a feature that allowed Kindle owners to have their Kindles read any text aloud. This was a godsend for people with print disabilities and anyone who wanted to have text converted to speech. But even though people had bought devices and titles with this feature in mind, Amazon caved to a few audiobook publishers and reached into peoples' devices, removing this feature from them. Text-to-speech is no more or less illegal on your Kindle than it is on your laptop, phone or other device -- but if you have to bypass Amazon's DRM to install the feature, you risk liability under Section 1201 of the DMCA.

Third party consumables for 3D printers

Nicola Ginzler

Inkjet printers are practically the original sin of computers that try to force their customers to optimize their usage to benefit the manufacturers' shareholders, not the owners of the device. Any time a device requires that you buy something periodically to keep it running, there's going to be someone who thinks they're a genius for thinking of a way to force you to buy their product rather than the competition's. A business that sells you a printer already has the hometown advantage when it comes to selling you the ink or plastic or whatever that goes inside it -- if they can't keep your business in the face of a competitive marketplace, they didn't deserve it in the first place.

Fonts on e-readers

Nicola Ginzler

In today's world, your ability to choose something as everyday as a typeface depends on the permission of the company that made your device and the software that runs on it. Choosing your typeface may seem like a novelty, but type design can have far-ranging implications for accessibility (some fonts are optimized for people with dyslexia and other cognitive print disabilities), clarity (other fonts are optimized the minimize the chance of mistaking one character for another, critical for technical applications), and even culture (the right to choose a script that matches the language you're reading can make all the difference).

Arielle

Coleen Baik

Today's world of amazing technology owes its existence to the low cost of entry: anyone can make anything and bring it to the world to see if it catches on. From emoji to email, the web to Netflix, the permissionless technology world lets us turn today's improbable idea into tomorrow's billion-dollar business. So yeah: adaptive, automated soundtracks for your ebooks, mining your music library for exactly the right track to play to enhance the mood of the fiction you're reading, scene by scene and song by song. All it takes is the right idea, and the right to get around the DRM on those ebooks.

SugarSafer Plus

Nicola Ginzler

As we move from having computers in our pockets to computers on our skin to computers inside our body, whether we use computers becomes less voluntary, and who gets to control those computers gets more critical.

GlycemiControl

Nicola Ginzler

Kids are often the involuntary early adopters of controlling, abusive technology, whether that's spying school laptops, location tracking phones apps, or teenager-repelling buzzers that emit tones that adult ears can't hear. If you want to see your future, look at what we're doing to the kids around you.

It’s My Pancreas

Nicola Ginzler

Kids are often the involuntary early adopters of controlling, abusive technology, whether that's spying school laptops, location tracking phones apps, or teenager-repelling buzzers that emit tones that adult ears can't hear. If you want to see your future, look at what we're doing to the kids.

If this sparked your interest in the possibilities of a contrafactual present day, where laws like the DMCA were stillborn and the freedom to use your property the way you saw fit was preserved by Congress, feel free to email your ideas for new missing devices to Cory Doctorow, cory@eff.org. We're happy to talk them through with you and if they suit our needs, to develop them for inclusion in the catalog.